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About terriko

Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we can all agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and AI) before robots from the future came to kill her and got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they're wrong, and maybe help fix things so that people won't agree so readily with the first sentence of this bio in the future.
Terri writes/tweets under the name terriko, enjoys making things and mentoring others and has a plain ol' home page at http://terri.toybox.ca.

While there are probably as many avenues into open source as there are open source contributors, two interesting programs are gearing up in March 2016 and I want to draw your attention to them. These both offer routes for new contributors who’d like to be paid, as well as opportunities for people and communities interested in mentoring.

Outreachy

Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.

Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander. We are planning to expand the program to more participants from underrepresented backgrounds in the future.

Applications for the program are now open and the deadline for applying is March 22, 2016. Free and open source software organizations and supporting companies are invited to express interest in sponsoring the program this round by March 22.

Read more about Outreachy and get application/sponsoship information on the Outreachy website. One thing that I think is really nice about Outreachy is that it is an internship that is not limited to students and recent graduates but instead focuses on underrepresented communities. I’ve never participated, but students and mentors alike have told me that it is a great program that fosters a deeper mentoring connection than many similar programs. I particularly love how communities around Outreachy really go out of their way to help the interns network and get access to job opportunities.

On a personal note, the Python Software Foundation currently has money that could be earmarked for Outreachy but insufficient mentorship available to sponsor an Outreachy intern. If you’re an experienced mentor and Python contributor, or willing to volunteer as an administrator who could try to entice and coordinate such people, please drop me a line at terri(at)toybox.ca and I’ll try to get you connected to the right folk.

Google Summer of Code

11 years, 103 countries, 515 open source organizations, 11,000 students.
Over 50 million lines of code.

Spend your summer break writing code and learning about open source development while earning money! Accepted students work with a mentor and become a part of the open source community. Many become lifetime open source developers! The 2016 student application window is March 14th to 25th.

Google Summer of Code is open to post-secondary students, age 18 and older in most countries.

You can read more about it on the Google Summer of Code website. It’s a pretty neat program: Google chooses a set of open source organizations to participate each year (2016’s orgs should be chosen by the time this post goes up!), then those organizations in turn get slots and choose students who they’re willing to mentor. Google pays the students, the open source groups provide the mentoring, and the students provide code and fresh ideas.

I’ve been involved with GSoC for a number of years, as a mentor for GNU Mailman, I did a few years as a mentor and administrator for Systers (a women in computing organization; I no longer mentor for them because the time commitment wasn’t possible), and the past few years I’ve been the organization administrator for the Python Software Foundation. It’s a great program that has really had a huge impact on the open source communities who participate — I’m particularly proud of one of my students with Mailman who went on to become one of our more active core contributors.

Interested in participating as a student?

If you haven’t participated in the program, you may not know that the largest group of applicants are young men from India, in part because many Indian colleges actively encourage their students to apply. So if you’re someone who is not a young man from India, you’ll be a minority in this context! Many open source projects are especially eager to talk to students in other time zones (sometimes there are mentors who go idle because no students are available to work to their schedules!) and with different academic backgrounds, so this can be a chance to really stand out.

Here on the Geek Feminism Blog, we’ve talked about GSoC quite a few times. Here’s two posts that might be useful to you:

How do I choose a project or a sub-org? — Choosing a project is a pretty personal choice, but the sheer number of projects can be overhwelming. This link includes some questions to help you narrow down the field.

We need mentors too!

Both Outreachy and GSoC groups are actively recruiting mentors right now. If you’re involved with a open source project that’s participating and willing to spend some mentoring time, these are both structured programs that can be great ways to give back to your open source community.

If your project isn’t contributing, there’s still time to sign yourselves up for Outreachy! And although GSoC mentoring organization applications have closed, there may still be opportunities for new mentors who are willing to learn a new project or participate as a “sub org” under the umbrella of a larger organization.

Not in a position to mentor? Cheer on the students, advertise the program, or use this as an excuse to learn a new project and follow along with the incoming students as they learn!

We try to focus new material here at Geek Feminism, but I was just reading this study entitled “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations” by Castilla and Bernard, and I think it’s worth highlighting despite being from 2010. (Warning: it is also based on a gender binary model; those of you who seeking more nuanced gender-based research may want to give this one a miss.)

To give you an idea of what’s in this study, here’s a screenshot of the one page that I think contains a lot of highlights:

Page 26 of the study “The Paradox of Meritocracy in Organizations”

For those who cannot see the image, there’s a few important things in there. I’ll list them here in reverse order vs what you see on that page as I think it tells a more clear story of the paper:

Two quotes that I’ve highlighted:

This article advanced research on this question by empirically testing, for the first time in the literature, whether certain management efforts to promote meritocracy in the workplace may have the causal effect of increasing ascriptive bias

and

Although these efforts by employers are aimed at improving equal opportunity and linking merit to employees’ careers, recent empirical studies have found that workplace disparities persist

There is also a graph which shows that with their “non-meritocratic condition” (a “control” situation where meritocracy and manager choice were not emphasized) bonuses were fairly similar for men and women but when meritocracy was emphasized in the organization, men received much higher bonuses on average.

In short, the study shows that emphasizing meritocracy appears to increase a tendency to reward men, rather than actually rewarding contributors based on merit. Pretty awkward. Emphasizing manager choice, strangely, resulted in advantaging women over men (possibly due to over-correction?), which is awkward in a different way. But either way, it seems like talking in terms of meritocracy probably makes the choices less meritocratic, and that’s a serious problem if you were hoping that meritocracy would eventually solve your diversity issues.

There’s actually a lot of interesting stuff in there, but I’d like to encourage folk to read the paper themselves. The paper is open access and can be found here (click on the links to download the pdf to get the whole thing). Please feel free to discuss or highlight out other parts of it you found interesting!

I’ve often heard people say that math is one of the few school subjects where marking isn’t subjective, but apparently not:

Beginning in 2002, the researchers studied three groups of Israeli students from sixth grade through the end of high school. The students were given two exams, one graded by outsiders who did not know their identities and another by teachers who knew their names.

In math, the girls outscored the boys in the exam graded anonymously, but the boys outscored the girls when graded by teachers who knew their names. The effect was not the same for tests on other subjects, like English and Hebrew. The researchers concluded that in math and science, the teachers overestimated the boys’ abilities and underestimated the girls’, and that this had long-term effects on students’ attitudes toward the subjects.

Many years ago, I won an women in computing scholarship that helped support my PhD research. It was from a large US-based company who puts a lot of work into supporting women in computing, and I owe them great thanks, but I won’t name them because this story is a bit embarrassing to them. Even a group doing their best by women in computing can make a funny mis-step!

The setting: Their team had organized a scholars retreat at their office in a major US city, including a series of interesting talks from women at the company, including both technical and more social talks. It was an amazing trip, except for one moment: One of the ladies speaking to us started extolling the virtues of their generous 6-week maternity leave policy. At least, as you can see from the graphic above, it’s generous by US standards…

But we were a group of young women from Canada. The scholarship winners started looking at each other. Should we say something? Finally, one of the students put up her hand: “You should probably know that Canada has a 50 week maternity leave policy…”

What followed was a highly amusing few minutes where a whole lot of women at this tech company learned a fascinating new thing about parenting in Canada. And an adorably awkward recovery of “well, I guess maybe those of you planning to have kids soon will be excited to know about our new Canadian office!”

I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s heard stuff like this at recruiting events, so tell me: what amusing (or not so amusing!) gaffes have you heard from companies eager to recruit more women?

And, as the subject says, this is an open thread, so feel free to add comments on any subject at all, including past posts, things we haven’t posted on, what you’ve been thinking or doing, etc as long as they follow our comment policy.

I’ve known Leslie for years now, and she is forever inspiring me with her ability not only to find visionary ways to improve the world, but also to follow-through with the rabble-rousing, cat herding, paperwork, and everything else that’s needed to take ideas from “wouldn’t it be nice if?” to “this is how we’re going to do it.” I really enjoyed her recent blog post, A Place to Hang Your Hat, and asked Leslie if she had a bit of time for an interview to tell Geek Feminism blog readers a bit more about the idea.

For people who haven’t read your blog post yet, can you give us the point of “let’s all build a hat rack” in a few sentences?

In open source software projects – and life in general – there are any number of contributions that are underappreciated or go unacknowledged. I’m very aware of how often that underappreciation or lack of acknowledgement is due to socialization around what labor is considered valuable vs. what is largely invisible – we are taught to value and celebrate the accomplishments of white men and minimize the impact of the labor of women, people of color, transpeople, differently abled people, etc.

The let’s all build a hat rack project is a call to acknowledge all the diverse contributors and contributions in our work lives and volunteer projects, with a special emphasis on acknowledging folks who are not like you first. You can do this easily by writing them a recommendation on LinkedIn – which they can decide to approve for inclusion on their profile – or just sending them a thank you note they can use later. Bonus points for sharing your appreciation on social media using hashtag #LABHR.

It came about for a few reasons, but first and foremost I want to acknowledge Deb Nicholson for inspiring the phrase “let’s all build a hat rack.” There’s more about Deb’s contributions to my thinking and the open source community in the post, so please check it out.

Beyond that, the project came about largely due to the intersection of two frustrations: the lack of understanding people have for everything I – and friends like Deb – have accomplished, and the seemingly unending cycle of horrible news in the tech industry. While it’s important to have a clear and candid dialog about sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia and other issues impacting the diversity of the technical community, that seems to be all I am reading lately. The news is usually sensationalistic and often depressing.

I wanted to give myself and everyone I know something uplifting and useful to read, to encourage all of us to show gratitude and appreciation, and to make that show of gratitude a useful way for contributors who are usually not acknowledged to get the credit they deserve. Not just because they deserve it, but because that public acknowledgement of their work helps with acquiring jobs, landing their next big project and feeling good about continued contributions.

What tips do you have for people struggling to find someone to recommend?

You know, I figured this project would be really easy until I started writing up recommendations. To my earlier point about being socialized to see some labor as invisible or less valuable, I had no trouble thinking up white dudes who had done things I appreciate. I had to push myself harder to think about the women in my life who have made significant contributions, even though they are numerous. I can imagine that some humans, specifically male humans, are having the same issues.

So, to get started, think about things /actions / projects that have meant a great deal to you. Was there a conference you attended where you had an “ah ha” moment? Were you able to solve a problem thanks to great support on a project’s web forum or in their IRC channel? Did you read a blog post that was filled with brilliance and inspired you to be better at your craft? Cool. Were there people involved who were not like you? Great! Not sure exactly what they did? I’d call that an excellent opportunity to find out more about their involvement, thank them for educating you and their contribution, and then use that information to write a recommendation.

I’m not going to lie to anyone – you’re may have to think hard about this at first and it will be uncomfortable. You have to internalize the fact that you’ve been taught to see some very amazing work as non-existent or, at best, mere window dressing. That’s OK, too. The first step toward progress is thinking through that discomfort, then finding the humans to thank at the end of it.

If you’re still having trouble thinking of someone, that’s OK. Talk to your friends or fellow project members for suggestions. Tell them you’re thinking about participating in the #LABHR project, but need help getting started. Friends can help you think of people you’ve missed celebrating, and they may also want to join the experiment and recommend people, too!

I’ve always been impressed with your gracious ways of thanking and recommending people, so I feel like you must have some insight into writing good recommendations. Are there any suggestions you have for people who want to write a great ones?

Keep it short and simple. One of the things that makes writing recommendations hard is that we’re trying to encapsulate so many good qualities into a few short sentences. You don’t have to write down everything wonderful about the person you’re recommending, just the 3-5 ways they’ve been most impactful in your project / company / life. In a pinch, concentrate on things employers want to hear about, as that will make your recommendation most useful.

I’d like this experiment to give the technical community a reason to express more gratitude for all contributions. I especially want to give white male allies a clear, actionable path to improving things for underrepresented groups. Writing a recommendation will take you about 15 minutes, but it can have immeasurable impact on someone’s future career prospects.

I’m really excited to say that I’ve seen 15 permanent recommendations go by and a whole lot of shout-outs under the #LABHR hashtag so far. I hope many more recommendations will come.

We’re very excited to release Ellen Kooijman’s Female Minifigure set, featuring 3 scientists, now entitled “Research Institute” as our next LEGO Ideas set. This awesome model is an inspiring set that offers a lot for kids as well as adults. The final design, pricing and availability are still being worked out, but it’s on track to be released August 2014. For more information, see the LEGO Ideas Blog.

“Research Institute” LEGO set, including three female scientists: the Astronomer, the Paleontologist, and the Chemist

I had been building with LEGO bricks for 10 years since coming out of my Dark Age (LEGO-devoid period), but I had never shared any of my creations online. This project was going to be the first creation I ever shared with people other than my husband. The idea for the project came very naturally and the question how I came up with it always makes me smile. As a female scientist I had noticed two things about the available LEGO sets: a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures. It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female minifigures in interesting professions to make our LEGO city communities more diverse.

As a geochemist I started with designs close to my own profession, a geologist and a chemist, and then expanded the series to include other sciences and other professions. Support rates in the first weeks after posting were slow, but at some point it started to pick up speed and many people left positive comments on the project, which encouraged me to expand and develop the project. I designed 12 little vignettes in total that consist of a minifigure with a 6×4 base plate and a corresponding setting to enhance the building experience and stimulate creativity. When designing the vignettes I tried to add things that would also make them attractive to people not necessarily interested in female figures. Especially the dinosaur skeleton turned out to be a real winner that is popular with a variety of people ranging from teenage boys, to parents, to AFOLs, etc. It is easy to imagine a different setting where the skeleton may come alive chasing the minifig or it could stimulate more building, for example a museum where it can be displayed.

Her other career women vignettes are also pretty awesome. I hope that some someday LEGO will consider producing those as well. Here’s a second science-y set to whet your appetites:

More scientist LEGO: Falconer with two birds, Geologist with compass and hammer in the field & Robotics Engineer designing a robot arm

My former hackerspace, in fundraising for the new space, offered up a reward tier that let you name one of the rooms, which was a pretty fun perk. “My” room is going to be #16 on this map, the larger of the two electronics labs:

Being the sort of person I am, I named it the “Pink Fluffy Unicorn Dancing on Rainbows Laboratory” thanks to this earwormy video. (Original song here, punk version here.)

They can call it PFUDOR labs for short or something. I actually proposed it as a joke when the campaign first was getting set up, but it got so many laughs that I decided it was actually kind of fun to have a name that really didn’t take itself too seriously.

A few days after I made the official declaration, I got an email from an adult male friend there, bemoaning my choice of names in a gentle, joking, but also a little bit sincere way.

He is a friend and I don’t want to mock his words in public, but I saw the email and thought THIS IS HOW I KNOW I HAVE CHOSEN THE RIGHT NAME. If this even a little hurts the manhood of even someone who knows me and my sense of humour, then you know that the anti-girly sentiment often prevalent in hacklabs is going to be rankled by this for as long as the space lasts. So now not only do I get to earworm my friends, but I run the risk of affronting people who haven’t quite dealt with their own minor misogyny? And maybe give the hacklab an excuse to fill a space with rainbows, with all the connotations thereof? That actually kind of sounds like a bigger social win than I was intending, but maybe, just maybe, it’ll combine with the already excellent people at Quelab to help keep the space as friendly and fun as it can be.

So next up I’m going to be buying a friend’s pony patterns, a bunch of stuff from adafruit, some fabric, and I’ll be making a hilarious e-textile pony with glowing rainbow neopixels to go in the space. Because I am not very subtle. ;)

Geobiologist Dr. Hope Jahren decided to challenge scientists to take part in a hashtag mostly aimed at teenaged girls: Seventeen Mag’s weekly #ManicureMonday tag. What followed was a lot of fun: people showing off their hands doing science!

Right now, there are two big initiatives going on for those interested in getting involved in Free and Open Source Software:

Google Summer of Code (deadline: May 3)

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers students stipends to write code for open source projects. Students work from home, paired up with at least one mentor who can guide them through the process of collaborating with their project’s community. There are a huge number of projects suggestions available, and many projects also accept new ideas from students if you think you’ve got an idea that would be great.

The stipend is $5,000 (USD) for approximately 40h/week of work from June 17 to September 23, so this is a pretty decent short-term job.

The deadline to apply is May 3rd, but if you’re interested it’s worth getting involved now because it takes time to find an organization you want to work with, meet the developers, and get help from them in producing a really terrific application.

I’m the org admin for the Python Software Foundation this year. As well as sponsoring development on the Python programming language itself, we’re an umbrella organization for a large number of projects that use Python, including my own favourite open source project GNU Mailman, a variety of scientific tools, development toolkits, and more. The whole list is here. I’ve been fortunate enough to meet a lot of the mentors in person at PyCon this year, and I’m really excited to be working with them, and I think you will be too!

I’m also involved with Systers, which as you may know is an organization for technical women. As one might expect, working with Systers is a great opportunity to work with technical women on an open source project! More information can be found on their wiki.

I know lots of other folk here are involved with GSoC: please feel free to advertise your projects in the comments!

Outreach program for Women (deadline: May 1)

If you’re a woman who’s interested in getting involved in open source, you may also want to check out the Outreach Program for Women which is similar to GSoC but not limited to students:

Outreach Program for Women (OPW) internships were inspired in many ways by Google Summer of Code and by how few women applied for it in the past. This was reflective of a generally low number of women participating in the FOSS development.
…
By having a program targeted specifically towards women, we found that we reached talented and passionate participants, who were uncertain about how to start otherwise. We hope this effort will help many women learn how exciting, varied and valuable work on FOSS projects can be and how inclusive the community really is. This program is a welcoming link that will connect you with people working on individual projects in various FOSS organizations and guide you through your first contribution.

Here’s the poster:

Not a student or a woman but want to get involved?

For those of you who are experienced open source contributors:

Many projects are still signing up mentors for GSoC. I usually tell people that this is a 0-10h/week volunteer job (although you do get a t-shirt!) where you get a chance to work with a protégé for the summer and show them the ropes. It can be very busy at times (especially right now when students are just starting and have lots of questions) but it’s very rewarding. Even if your project isn’t one of the ones participating this year, you can still help other projects by doing things like hanging out on IRC to help students set up their development environments.

For those of you not in open source but would like to be:

While these programs are only open to students and women, now is actually a pretty decent time to get involved with a new project because mentors are available to answer questions and students are asking lots of the questions so you don’t have to. Go join a mailing list or irc channel and see if you can follow along!

For everyone:

Please advertise these programs to students and women who might not otherwise see them! Put up posters where minorities not usually represented in open source will see them, help encourage people who might be too nervous to submit an application, and help connect these folk directly to projects whenever you can.

Got questions?

Feel free to ask in the comments below. I believe we have plenty of folk here involved with both programs who’d be happy to help you get involved!